Home Ward Community Guidelines
What Home Ward is for
Home Ward is a place for wards, congregations and families to share ordinary good news with people they actually know. It is for adults 18 and over, in the United States, and at launch we review content in English.
What is not allowed
- Harassment and abuse. Targeting, demeaning or intimidating another person.
- Hate speech. Attacking people over race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
- Sexual content. Nudity and sexually explicit imagery.
- Violence and gore. Graphic violence, or threatening or encouraging it.
- Sexual content involving minors. Absolutely prohibited, without exception, and reported to the authorities.
- Other people's private information. Contact details, financial details, credentials or identifiers belonging to someone else.
- Scams and spam. Fraud, deceptive schemes, and bulk unwanted posting.
- Impersonation. Presenting yourself as someone you are not, including using another person's photograph as your profile picture.
- Content you have no right to share, including other people's copyrighted work.
- Intimate images shared without consent.
Writing about your own distress is not a rule violation. See If someone may be in crisis.
How review actually works
Nothing you post is visible to anyone else until automated review has cleared it. A new post or reply is created hidden, visible only to you, and enters the feed when review clears it. A post with photos publishes only when the text clears and every photo is approved.
- Clear violations are removed automatically, with no person involved.
- Borderline content is not. It is held out of sight and queued for a person, who may decide to publish it.
- Content not in English is not decided by a machine. It is held for a person.
- If review breaks, nothing publishes. Content stays hidden rather than going out unchecked.
- Editing a post sends it back through review and hides it until the new decision lands.
We do not publish a target response time, because we do not yet measure one and would rather not promise something we cannot show.
What we can do
At the content level we can remove a post, a reply or a photo, and put a removed post back. At the account level there are exactly three states — active, suspended and banned. A suspension or ban withdraws posting, commenting, liking, friend requests, and appearing in member lookup and ward rosters.
⚠️ Being suspended or banned never takes away your ability to read, to block someone, or to report someone. A ban also hides that account's posts, replies and photos from other members — and because that is computed as the account is read rather than written onto the content, restoring the account restores everything.
We never show one member another member's enforcement status. There is no badge and no marker, and content hidden because of a ban looks exactly like content its author deleted.
We do not operate a "zero tolerance" rule, and we would rather not claim one: the response is meant to be proportionate to what happened.
Reporting and blocking
You can report a post, a reply, or a member, with a reason and a note. Reports raising someone's safety, or that a member may be too young for Home Ward, go to the top of the queue.
- Reporting is never taken away from you. A suspended or banned member can still report, and blocking someone does not stop you reporting them.
- Blocking hides each of you from the other everywhere, in both directions. Muting is narrower — it only removes someone from your feed.
- You cannot report your own content or your own account.
- ⚠️ We do not tell you the outcome of a report you file. That is deliberate: telling a reporter what happened to someone else's account would disclose that person's enforcement status.
If someone may be in crisis
Content suggesting someone may be at risk of harming themselves is never removed automatically. It is held out of sight, routed to a person, and the author is shown crisis resources — in the United States, call or text 988 — and told that someone from Home Ward will reach out. Expressing distress is not a violation and nothing is counted against your account for it.
Child safety
Sexual content involving minors is prohibited without exception. Photos are checked against known child-sexual-abuse-material hashes; a match is blocked, preserved, and reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
If you disagree with a decision
We tell you when we remove your content and why, and you can ask us to look at the decision again. Reach us at legal@home-ward.com.
⚠️ We do not promise to warn you before acting, and there is no warning step in the product.